The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'.

Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.

An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons. It's often very difficult to get the right environment to actively explore where an emotion is coming from - purely because of the reactions in other people - which try to suppress, deflect, minimize, etc.

Strangely, simply agreeing or validating someone's outcome is actually a way of minimizing or deflecting the scary expression. Let's not go deeper, let's not figure out where this is coming from - you just go with your gut and act.

Getting to the root of an emotion can come in waves and many iterations. It can be incredibly useful to try and completely unhook action from it.

I've had very strong emotions from events that were almost always "right emotion, wrong reason/story" and I've slowly corrected the 'why' multiple times over.

A lot of those corrections took removing people from my life that made it hard to feel or have access to those difficult emotions.

I wonder if you value that family member or just the idea of them. Value them only when they're 'stable'? Want to get in the muck with them to find where instability comes from? It's okay to not. It's less okay IMO to stay connected to someone you require change from. If you don't like behavior, say it and leave/create much space. Give them agency to choose, agency to fail, agency to be someone you don't like, agency to not be okay.

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Aurornis 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.

A lot of people in this comment thread are trying to rewrite this situation. That's not what happened.

The problem was that she would have a strong emotional reaction to something and her partner would go along with it: Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.

This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.

	▲	relaxer 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way. IDK if anything here counts as a good container for emotion. 'validate' is very ambiguous. 'comfort' is very different from presence. It can actually be a way of invalidating funnily enough. 'not question' has a lot going on. I definitely hear a lot of enablement in your example. It sounds like she is better off without that. > This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning. I agree here. Validate itself is a loaded term, especially in the tech world. It sounds like it implies correctness. Maybe I'm onboard with just a need for 'emotional presence' over 'validation'. Validation can slide into enablement. Challenge can slide into invalidation. Presence is the impossible one. Having someone you can openly explore an emotion, even just say it all without evoking a fear or anger response, a validation or invalidation response from. Let's it just hang in the air without reaction. Let's it exist without adding distance or withdrawing connection. Have endless curiosity. I do think I am onboard with validation being a more dangerous term. I get its origin/concept - maybe trying to combat the amount of invalidation in the world but it's ironic to see how invalidating the wrong kind of validation can be.